During a conference call announcing the news, Burgum was asked about the challenges Nadella will face in the role. First he cited areas of progress (among other things, the Microsoft Business Solutions division was profitable for the first time last year). Without naming any competitors (Oracle, SAP, IBM, Salesforce.com, etc.) Burgum answered the question this way:

“In part because of the fragmented nature of the business, we’ve got low (market) share. So one of the challenges that we have is how to take low share and make it high share. … That’s a very fertile field for us to continue to pursue more innovation and drive value for customers in the marketplace. So there’s a lot of challenges there. And then the other thing is that we are not as globally dispersed in terms of our revenue, for example, as say the Office business. And so we have a lot of global markets around the world where we effectively still need to enter those markets with localized products for (enterprise resource planning).”

He cited the trend toward online business applications as another challenge. Nadella said the company will continue to work with the Microsoft partners who offer hosted applications, while working on its own direct online offerings. The company started last year with the announcement of Dynamics Live CRM.